#14: User Modeling and Superlinked with Daniel Svonava

Recsperts - Recommender Systems Experts

In episode number 14 of Recsperts we talk to Daniel Svonava, CEO and Co-Founder of Superlinked, delivering user modeling infrastructure. In his former role he was a senior software engineer and tech lead at YouTube working on ad performance prediction and pricing.

We discuss the crucial role of user modeling for recommendations and discovery. Daniel presents two examples from YouTube’s ad performance forecasting to demonstrate the bandwidth of use cases for user modeling. We also discuss sources of information that fuel user models and additional personlization tasks that benefit from it like user onboarding. We learn that the tight combination of user modeling with (near) real-time updates is key to a sound personalized user experience.

Daniel also shares with us how Superlinked provides personalization as a service beyond ecommerce-centricity. Offering personalized recommendations of items and people across various industries and use cases is what sets Superlinked apart. In the end, we also touch on the major general challenge of the RecSys community which is rebranding in order to establish a more positive image of the field.

Enjoy this enriching episode of RECSPERTS - Recommender Systems Experts.

Chapters:

• (03:35) - Introduction Daniel Svonava
• (10:18) - Introduction to User Modeling
• (17:52) - User Modeling for YouTube Ads
• (35:43) - Real-Time Personalization
• (57:29) - ML Tooling for User Modeling and Real-Time Personalization
• (01:07:41) - Superlinked as a User Modeling Infrastructure
• (01:31:22) - Rebranding RecSys as Major Challenge
• (01:37:40) - Final Remarks

Links from the Episode:

• Daniel Svonava on LinkedIn
• Daniel Svonava on Twitter
• Superlinked - User Modeling Infrastructure
• The 2023 MAD (Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science) Landscape
• Eric Ries: The Lean Startup
• Rob Fitzpatrick: The Mom Test

Papers:

• Liu et al. (2022): Monolith: Real Time Recommendation System With Collisionless Embedding Table
• RSPapers Collection

General Links:

• Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarcelKurovski
• Send me your comments, questions and suggestions to [e-mail]
• Podcast Website: https://www.recsperts.com/